You know about broadband lines and telephone lines. But what's a T1 line? It's a professional grade telecom service that's normally delivered only to business locations. A few well-heeled individuals with demanding needs in their home offices, usually business or investment related, have T1 lines installed. Most home users would rather put up with the limitations of shared access services such as DSL or Cable Internet since they can be had for a tenth the cost.
Shared access is a hallmark of the cheapest broadband services. In actuality, the Internet Service Providers themselves have always used T1 lines or larger DS3 or OCx service for their own backbone connections to the Internet. The way they make money is to divvy up the available bandwidth among dozens of users so the cost per subscriber can be kept low. For casual access to browse the Web or send and receive email, DSL and Cable broadband work just fine. Small businesses where Internet access is helpful but not critical to their operations may also find these services satisfactory.
Where T1 shows its true advantages is in mission critical services. What are those? If you depend on your telecom service to make and receive telephone calls, enter orders, manage inventory, transfer files, text or chat with customers, or do research that can't wait for slow or disconnected line services, your need is mission critical.
This is especially true if your connection supports real-time applications such audio or video program feeds, surveillance cameras, or VoIP telephone systems. Text services such as email and Web site browsing are pretty robust when it comes to line vagaries such as jitter, latency and even packet loss. The TCP/IP protocol used for these applications will simply request a retransmission of data that doesn't show up. Real time audio and video don't have that luxury. Anything that is missing can't be made up later. It simply results in a hole in the audio or a drop out in the video.
The advantages of T1 service include a high degree of service availability, often with a service level guarantee. The bandwidth is dedicated solely for you own use. You can depend on a rock solid 1.5 Mbps in both the upload and download directions at all times. If you need more bandwidth than this, you can bond additional T1 lines to easily double or triple your connection bandwidth. Latency, jitter and packet loss are kept to very low levels, making T1 service perfect for real-time applications. In fact, many radio station use T1 lines as studio-to-transmitter links for their program audio.
T1 lines come in various flavors, depending on your business need. T1 Dedicated Internet access gives you professional grade broadband service. Point to Point T1 lines are direct connections between two locations, often a company's main and satellite offices. T1 telephone or ISDN PRI service is used to deliver multiple telephone lines to your PBX phone system. SIP Trunking does the same for IP PBX or enterprise VoIP phone systems. Finally, Integrated T1 service combines telephone and broadband Internet service on a single line to save money for small business users.
Is your business ready for the advantages of T1 line service? Our team of experts are happy to help you decide on the most cost effective type of T1 connection for your business needs.
